If you have been following political public opinion polls over the past 5 or so years in El Salvador, these numbers will look pretty familiar. The results for ARENA and the FMLN represent each party's hard core support. These are the persons who are going to vote for that party's candidate no matter who it is and no matter what else happens before election day. But the biggest segment, up until shortly before the election is always the undecided segment.

Obviously the biggest thing people will want to know -- who will be the candidates of each party and will there be any viable candidates other than the ones put forward by ARENA and the FMLN? ARENA has announced that it plans to select its candidate through a nationwide primary selecting among three candidates. But there have not been many indications about who those candidates might be. It's safe to say the candidate won't vary in any material ways from the policies of Tony Saca.

On the left, the momentum is increasing for Mauricio Funes to be the candidate of the FMLN. In fact, no one else seems to be getting any support within the ranks of FMLN leaders. Because of this, Megavision television network has announced that its contract with Funes for his morning interview show will end sometime this month. Megavision asserts that Funes has become too much of a partisan political figure and that is inconsistent with the role of the network in provide the news in a nonpartisan fashion. This week Funes met with Lula, the popular moderate leftist president of Brazil.

Comments

«It's safe to say the candidate won't vary in any material ways from the policies of Tony Saca.»

What's your support for this statement?

Saca's policies differ significantly from his predecessors. For instance, he has not privatized anything, unlike the Cristiani, Calderón, and Flores administrations. Also reversing prior ARENA practice, Saca is a populist statist who has been committed to creating all kinds of ineffective new bureaucracies (MiTur, ISNA, TribEt, IRF, SupComp, MegaSIGET, MinSeg, just to mention a few). Government payrolls and expenditures have burgeoned under Saca.

Saca is a Perón writ small.

The next ARENA candidate could be another petty dwarf, Saca-style, or another enlightened reformer, Cristiani-style. Do you really not see a policy difference?

Saca has tried to privatize, it's just that it was not well planned and didn't work out or received popular rejection and was stopped cold. If Tony is Perón, who's his Evita?

Must be devastating for all those free market loving, neoliberal spouting, and pontificating princes of privatization that this bargain basement populist statist Peronist dwarf hasn't brought home the bacon.

Well, in the words of 20 Fingers from a big Salvadoran microbus sound system hit in 1998:

«Must be devastating for all those free market loving, neoliberal spouting, and pontificating princes of privatization that this bargain basement populist statist Peronist dwarf hasn't brought home the bacon.»

It is devastating!

Worse yet, this guy's performance has been so atrociously incompetent there are decent chances he will manage to get the FMLN elected to replace himself!